CRM is a Social Animal

On The Scene: Web 2.0 -- As enterprise social computing takes off -- and employees clamor for more -- CRM providers scramble to connect, as well.

By Lauren McKay

Social networking is really connecting, it seems: Revenue in the sector has grown 191 percent in the past year, according to IDC. Forrester Research predicts that Enterprise 2.0 spending will be a $4.6 billion industry by the year 2013. With increased momentum, rising adoption on the enterprise level, and noticeable marketing and branding opportunities for businesses -- all readily apparent at May’s Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco -- social networking has clearly spread into the mainstream. Google’s effort to create its OpenSocial standard for application programming interfaces (APIs) among social-networking companies is another sign of a maturing marketplace.

Rachel Happe, Digital Business Economy researcher with IDC, is among those who think the next step with social networking will involve applying Enterprise 2.0 functionalities to business processes, such as CRM -- all in hope of finding the return on investment (ROI) for money spent getting wired into social networks.

"People are taking a functional business need that you can attach an ROI to, and using social media to experiment and see if they can expand ROIs," Happe says. She adds that employees are now engaging Enterprise 2.0 tools beyond those of blogs and wikis, and focusing more on social media with increased conversation on sites and platforms such as Facebook, MySpace, and LinkedIn. Employees, in their personal lives, are increasingly using social networks on the consumer level; that puts more pressure on enterprises to adopt social media applications, but it also breeds more familiarity.

According to the IDC report, "2007 Social Networking Takes Hold," authored by Happe, enterprise social media solutions have started to emerge and are passing up their small-to-midsize-business counterparts.

And not every enterprise social network has to rely on (or hook into) Facebook: According to a Time column by an executive of the search intelligence firm Hitwise, the aggregate market share of MySpace and Facebook among U.S. Internet users only accounts for roughly half of all visits to the Hitwise Social Network category. Hitwise lists more than 4,700 other sites in that category -- meaning there’s a lot of niche and specialized networking experience out there.

Take Trampoline Systems’ recent release of Sonar Dashboard, an entire social-computing platform created for enterprises. Sonar Dashboard is similar to Facebook only in that it allows users to connect with other users. However, Dashboard is designed specifically for the enterprise, allowing employees not only to create individual profiles, but to share information regarding work projects, contacts, and interests. User information is dynamically generated, providing the most up-to-date data for sharing. The Dashboard product also maps out relationships among employees in the enterprise, adding visualization to complicated, complex, and growing companies. (Oracle introduced similar enterprise social computing capabilities with the release of its CRM On Demand 15.) "You’ve got a generation of people in the workforce who are used to having these tools to search, reach out, and connect with anybody," says Charles Armstrong, the founder of Trampoline. "When they go into work, they’ve still got these information systems which are rigid. It’s the employees who are pushing the drive."

Analysts and vendors alike agree that the growth of business-side social networking can be attributed to consumer demands. And while real-time application of "social CRM" remains foggy, integration of enterprise and CRM software with social-networking platforms seems to have a sunny future. This is evident in solutions such as Faceforce, which puts Salesforce.com data side-by-side with Facebook profiles of customers, and that of Sales Social, a collaborative mashup from Kapow Technologies and Wavemaker that presents LinkedIn, Facebook, Salesforce.com, and Technorati customer data in one place. (See "Making Mashup Masterpieces," June 2008, for more about mashups.)

Other CRM products, such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM, are toying with social media in certain sectors before wide deployment. Microsoft Dynamics Connect Beta for Facebook, for instance, began with a community site for the finance unit of Dynamics. "The idea was that we were building up a unique set of communities tightly integrated to the product we use," says Craig Dewar, director of community marketing for Microsoft. "The assumption is that end users gain insight about [the] product by talking to other end users similar to themselves. They can talk about marketing campaigns, ask about CRM, and gain self-help," Dewar adds. (See "Is Microsoft Winning the CRM Race?" for our extensive look at Microsoft and its Dynamics CRM offerings.)

Happe says that linking CRM data with consumer-networking profiles will be the next step for CRM providers. Doing so can provide a lot of a value, particularly in gathering insight into the consumer mind. "CRM applications are clearly taking things more seriously," Happe points out. "In sales and marketing, it’s all about building trust and getting in to talk to people. What we’re learning is that you can use [networks] to build trust before you ever make an explicit request to speak with [prospective customers]."

9 Deadly Sins in Marketing

DMDays '08: A database is more than just a list of names—it's where marketers go wrong and how to get back on course.

By Jessica Tsai

NEW YORK—Arthur Middleton Hughes is old, rich, and famous—the latter two of which he attributes to his success in database marketing. Another contributing factor may be the many books he’s written on the topic, the latest of which is entitled, Strategic Database Marketing. In his presentation at the 2008 DM Days Conference and Expo here this morning, Hughes—vice president and solutions architect at Texas-based KnowledgeBase Marketing—explained how, even though we’ve had to sacrifice the intimacy of 1950s-era mom-and-pop grocery stores, technology can help marketers bridge this gap, improve customer loyalty, and, ultimately, increase sales.

There are two types of database people, Hughes says:

• The constructor: knows the ins and outs of how to build the list and getting it onto the Web; and
• The creator: knows how to use the names and build loyalty and repeat sales.

Companies will inevitably hit a dead end if they lack either of these, Hughes told the crowd. You need both types of database marketers to make it work. Hughes outlined the nine biggest mistakes marketers fall into when attempting to squeeze some benefit from their customer database:

• Lack of strategy. "What are you doing with the database?" Hughes asked. Building it is easy, but making a profit means marketers must figure out, "If I were a customer, why would I want to be in this database? What’s in it for me?" A successful database collects data on customer purchases, permits ad-hoc analysis, fuels information to create a customer lifetime value (LTV) table, and helps marketers figure out what motivates their customers.
• Focus on price. Databases build loyalty—coupons don’t. Study after study has shown that customers generally care about more than just low prices—though the current economic conditions may have pushed price higher on a consumer’s list of priorities. A positive shopping experience, according to Hughes, is typically associated with feelings of recognition, good service, quality information, convenience, and helpfulness.
• Lack of testing and controls. Most marketers fail to implement a control group when testing out the effects of their campaigns, opting instead to go big and launch the program on the whole database. Key measuring points include: response rates, return on investment (ROI), profits, and lifetime value.
• Poor segment strategy. Use your database to figure out who your best, most-loyal customers are—and then do everything you can to keep them, Hughes said. Those prime customers make up the bulk of your revenue. Don’t waste your resources on the less-valuable ones. Having customers complete profiles can also help you determine how they prefer to communicate with you and what their individual needs are.
• Failure to use the Web. The Web is an excellent place to collect customer data and shopping behavior. Moreover, after a consumer makes an online purchase, Hughes advises marketers to send a follow-up confirmation email within 30 seconds. The benefit is so tremendous, he says, that "if your software engineers can’t get this done, get rid of them."
• Building in-house. It costs too much and takes too long to build a database in-house. Many vendors—some present at DM Days—allow companies to outsource their database and save the headache of trying to build their own. Vendors in this field include: Experian, Merkle, and Harte-Hanks.
• Treating all customers alike. Returning the concept of segmentation, Hughes reiterated the importance of treating customers differently depending on their stage in buying cycle and their profitability.
• Lack of a retention program. It costs far more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one, and yet, Hughes said, marketers still fail to implement a retention strategy. One of the best ways to hang onto a customer, Hughes added, is to sell them another product.
• Lack of leadership. Marketing leaders need to take initiative to tie together the internal and external units. Channels include the Web, management information systems, customer service, technology support, telemarketing, service bureau, and direct agency.

A database has the power to give marketers insight into the preferences and needs of their customers. With the proliferation of choice, the customer has less incentive to be loyal. A database gives marketers an opportunity to make that personal connection. "You have to touch people’s lives," Hughes said.

Maximizing the Value of Salesforce.com By Leveraging Software-as-a-Service Business Intelligence and Analytics

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At a time when businesses of all sizes are facing unprecedented competition due to globalization and eCommerce, and the threat of recession in the US is placing severe budgetary pressures on their operations, a growing number of companies are seeking new ways to optimize their operations and maximize their new business opportunities.

In order to survive and succeed in this increasingly challenging business climate, companies of all sizes must gain greater insight into their business operations. For many of these companies, this means an increased focus on getting more value out of their customer relationship management (CRM) and salesforce automation (SFA) systems as well as a greater demand for business intelligence (BI) and analytic applications.

These trends have also fueled the growth of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Salesforce.com has become the leader of this new generation of web-based, on-demand solutions that are dramatically changing the way businesses harness the power of enterprise applications and capitalize on their previously untapped reservoir of corporate data.

This whitepaper will discuss the market trends which are driving companies of all sizes to adopt these more flexible and effective SaaS BI solutions to achieve their corporate objectives, like LucidEra's on-demand analytic applications.

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Open Source Is an Open Book for SaaS Providers

A new study from Gartner predicts that, by 2010, 90 percent of software-as-a-service providers will incorporate some component of open-source technologies into their infrastructures.

by Christopher Musico

During the CRM market's well-documented move from on-premise-only offerings to the on-demand world of software-as-a-service (SaaS), not as much attention has been given to the role that open-source technology can have in this shift. One aspect in particular that may have been overlooked, according to a recently published report from Gartner, is the extent to which open-source technologies are used in the infrastuctures of SaaS offerings.

The report -- "Open Source in SaaS, 2008" -- was written by Robert DeSisto, a Gartner vice president and a distinguished analyst specializing in applications strategies and government. "[The study is] more of an awakening of what is going on behind the scenes," DeSisto says. "The point is, no one ever asks what's going on behind the scenes with SaaS. The problem is, when people do it, they don't tend to worry about details -- so we're exposing [in this study] what's going on."

DeSisto explains that several CRM vendors -- in particular Salesforce.com, RightNow Technologies, and SugarCRM -- all use open source in one form or another. Salesforce.com, he says, uses an open-source database on its laptop disconnected version, while RightNow and Sugar use an open-source infrastructure stack on the server side. While particular vendors may use open source differently, DeSisto says that infrastructure isn't becoming a competitive differentiator -- and that is a good sign. "[Vendors] are not looking to differentiate on infrastructure," he says. "[They] are looking to differentiate on other elements on what they're providing."

DeSisto stresses that open source is not a negative -- leveraging open-source technology has its value propositions, which may explain why the Gartner report predicts that 90 percent of SaaS providers will utilize some form of open-source technology by 2010. DeSisto explains that leveraging an open-source framework can help vendors lower software development costs, which in turn could lower acquisition costs to end users -- but that's not a guarantee. The report acknowledges the posibility that "vendors may choose to improve profitability or increase R&D efforts with their savings." DeSisto also stresses that just because a SaaS vendor might opt for open source does not automatically improve its overall offerings. "If open source can enable [vendors] to not spend a lot of money they would have to pass on to users, themselves, whatever the case may be, then it is valuable," he posits. "But you can go open source and still have terrible practices or operating software so any advantage would be lost anyway. [Open-source technology] is not a magical secret sauce -- it's just one piece."

So what benefits can end users gain by buying from vendors that use open-source technology? Lower costs might be one, but DeSisto points to another long-term benefit: user communities. These self-forming groups can sprout up around application and platform providers, especially those utilizing open-source practices, often to share best practices or even entire applications. According to DeSisto's research, by 2010 open-source applications will make up at least 30 percent of a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) provider's ecosystem of available applications built on its native platform.

This statistic, however, is dependent upon the mass adoption of PaaS--and there is a chicken-or-egg kind of challenge that may impede this adoption. DeSisto explains that while some companies have the platform (such as Salesforce.com's Force.com) for this type of community, other companies (such as Microsoft and IBM) have the developers necessary to build out the application ecosystem. Having the combination of platform and developers is essential, he says. "The engine fuel is the [adoption of the] platform," he notes. "If the application platform has difficulty getting adopted, then I think we won't see as much open source in SaaS as we predicted."

Marketing: It's Nothing Personal

A report from the CMO Council reveals that personalization is a marketing force that isn't being fully utilized -- yet.

by Marshall Lager

The good news in the world of marketing is that more than more than half of all respondents in a recent Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council study plan to allocate 10 percent or more of their marketing budgets toward personalized communications, with a quarter of respondents allocating at least 20 percent. The bad news is that only a handful of respondents felt their previous personalization efforts had been successful, and 38 percent said they didn't even know whether personalized communications had outperformed traditional mass-marketing tactics.

"The Power of Personalization," a study of 700 senior marketers worldwide, reveals flaws in past attempts to get closer to the customer, while simultaneously preserving hope for a better tomorrow. "Clearly, CMOs are gaining more confidence in the process of personalization and are increasingly willing to direct more of their marketing budgets to personalized communication tactics," said Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council, in a statement. "Nevertheless, many marketers' programs have been deemed unsuccessful because of a lack of actionable customer data used in campaign planning -- as well as because of inadequate analytics used in assessing post-campaign effectiveness."

In a follow-up interview with destinationCRM, Neale-May adds that a disconnect exists between available capabilities and the willingness to use them. "The deficiency we're seeing in marketing organizations is a lack of intelligence, intimacy, and understanding regarding the customer," he says. "It's frustrating to see, because this isn't a new issue."

Neale-May attributes much of the personalization gap to inertia. "Tools -- and, increasingly, services -- exist to access individual-level customer data," he says. "They can predict which toothpaste brands might [fail], and which customers are likely to defect, but who's extracting and using the data for more targeted campaigns? Procter & Gamble is still doing mass marketing because its agency is pushing for it." In the study, 44 percent of respondents claimed low usage of personalized communications in their programs for customer acquisition and customer relationship management.

Still, marketers understand the value of personalization even if they aren't using it yet. "Personalization strategies and programs will be very important to maintaining customer relationships," Neale-May says. "A lot of marketers recognize the value of cross-channel communication."

More than advertising and special deals, personalization provides marketing communications with the means to deliver real value to customers. "Look at texting -- it's a very powerful channel for notifying customers," Neale-May says. "Chemical companies can notify farmers when the ideal time is to spray crops based on weather and other factors; drug companies can text people to remind them they need prescription refills."

The CMO Council study proposes a long list of winning strategies in personalized marketing communications, including:

• Individualized emails and letters;
• Opt-in, permission-based marketing programs;
• Targeted database marketing leveraging personal profiles;
• Personalized email promotions based on timing of sign-up and regular intervals thereafter;
• Print-on-demand collateral incorporating personalized content; and
• Variable Data Printing (VDP).

Neale-May says he's hopeful that better marketing practices will become mainstream in the near future. "Close to 50 percent of the CMOs we represent are hired to fix broken marketing organizations," he says. "If we can grow customer-analysis competencies in marketing organizations, this can make marketing spend more effective."

The End of Mass Marketing

Is on-demand marketing the way of the future?
by Georgia Hanias, founder, Cyrano Media

In today's telecommunications-savvy world, it takes a lot more to keep a customer happy than ever before. With so many telecom providers to choose from, customers have become immune to traditional and impersonal methods of marketing. Direct campaigns that have been used in the past -- such as telemarketing and direct mail -- are now becoming too costly to run and are largely ineffective. And lately it seems that everyone is offering a great bargain on phone services. So what's a business to do to stay on top?

Customer Lifecycle Management Like many other telecommunications-industry experts, Rob Bamforth, an analyst at Quo Circa, believes that a more one-to-one dialogue will be the key to keeping customers loyal, and stresses the role that this approach plays in today's mobile world. This individual-centric approach is being referred to as Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM).
"Since CLM is a relatively new concept, it's difficult to explain or define," Bamforth says. "The way I would describe it is context-oriented mobile marketing."
Another way of describing CLM is "Marketing on Demand." Through the use of real-time behavioral marketing, CLM enables operators to manage, evaluate, and automate customer interactions to support one-to-one dialogues, based on user profiles, behaviors, and previous exchanges. It creates a bond between the operator and the customer throughout the customer's lifecycle so that the operator knows exactly what the customer wants and is able to communicate the right service to her in real time. This approach can help lower churn and increase revenue generated from each customer.

"CLM providers have a major challenge ahead of them, and that is to convince mobile operators that behavior-based marketing is an important opportunity that is worth investing in," Bamforth adds. "I believe it has a future in mobile telephony -- especially in advanced sectors where there is a blurring of fixed and mobile services. This convergence is eating away at revenue generated by traditional services such as voice calls. To find new ways of earning income and keeping customers happy, operators have to differentiate themselves from their competitors -- and to do so in a way that makes a subscriber feel valued and not just a number. CLM can help achieve this by enabling an operator to target an individual person."
One of the companies offering CLM technology in the mobile sector is Agillic, a United Kingdom-based enterprise set up eight years ago to provide an answer to falling revenues and customer disloyalty. Agillic offers operators a unique way to communicate with customers by deploying marketing-on-demand solutions that are quick and easy to deploy requiring little or no integration with underlying systems.

Case Study: Telenor SONOFON Among Agillic's big success stories is its collaboration with Danish GSM leader Telenor SONOFON, which deployed the company's Pre-Paid and Post-Paid CLM solutions. "Before CLM, customers were migrating to other mobile operators with the belief that they could get better products and services at more competitive prices, without realizing that [we] could offer them the same if not better," explains Martin Kildgaard Nielson, Telenor SONOFON's CRM manager. "This lack of customer loyalty was the result of our inability to communicate more effectively with each of our subscribers and to do so with cross-channel synergy. We needed to address this serious challenge before we could improve our performance in the market."

Agillic provided the foundation for a communications strategy that could manage both inbound and outbound communications with each customer. "Agillic's CLM solution gave us the potential to build a relationship with each customer over time by learning from every dialogue," Kildgaard Nielson says. "It could also support real-time interaction, allowing us to react swiftly to customer behaviors. So if a user clicked on a Web link we could automatically send out a message that was pertinent for that moment in time. All of these capabilities helped the company create a targeted marketing campaign that fit the user profile of each individual high-value customer." Thanks to CLM, during the first year Telenor SONOFON reduced churn among its high-value post-paid customers by 50 percent and increased its average revenue per user by between 5 percent and 10 percent.

Bamforth says he expects that more telecommunications providers will follow Telenor SONOFON's path toward delivering a more individualized service to customers. "There is definitely a future for CLM, but the big challenge is getting broader recognition for this marketing approach and carving out a niche in the telecoms sector."

CRM Market Set to Double

Recent studies predict the global CRM market will double within six years, and suggest explosive growth in CRM adoption across every segment -- especially on-demand CRM.

by Joshua Weinberger, with reporting by Demir Barlas and Jean Thilmany

Good news for CRM vendors: CRM software investment, adoption, and product revenues are all set to rise, according to a recent report from market analysis firm Datamonitor.

Though Datamonitor estimates the 2006 global CRM software market was worth just under $3.6 billion in license revenue alone, the research firm's analysis finds the market hasn't yet matured. In fact, less than half of U.S. companies -- 42 percent -- are using CRM, according to new research from the consulting firm KensingtonHouse. Datamonitor predicts a compound annual growth rate of approximately 10.5 percent through 2012, nearly doubling in size to $6.6 billion.

Datamonitor attributes that predicted growth to increasing deployment of CRM in new vertical sectors, such as healthcare and life sciences, as well as to a high degree of flexibility in deployment that will bring smaller-size end users on board.

Even more notable, in terms of current and future growth, is the fact that CRM's "market fertility" -- the percentage of companies deploying, upgrading, or actively considering a CRM purchase -- stands at 38 percent, according to the KensingtonHouse report.

The market-fertility figure is the metric KensingtonHouse chose to highlight, as it reveals a record number of companies deploying or planning to deploy CRM. "This is significantly above what I've seen historically, which has been 18 to 25 percent fertility," says Thomas Moriarty, the consultancy's president.

According to KensingtonHouse, the main reason for the current wave of CRM popularity is the maturity of the on-demand delivery model and functionality set. Fifty-five percent of respondents expressed a preference for on-demand, with a mere 14 percent nominating on-premise and 31 percent undecided. Though 87 percent of survey respondents were either small or midsize businesses (SMBs), Moriarty says that the preference for on-demand extends to the enterprise segment as well. (The research canvassed 437 respondents representing a population of 20,000 companies with a degree of accuracy of plus or minus 5 percent.)

On-demand's benefits include its low cost and its simplicity, Moriarty says: The model can lower the cost of a CRM deployment by as much as 60 percent while also offering an increasingly user-friendly experience.

While on-demand can be easier to implement than on-premise, adopters of either variety should still be aware of the risks of project failure. Gartner recently predicted that, by the end of 2008, "25 percent of CRM projects will be postponed or canceled because of the CRM skill shortage in consultants and systems integrators." Moriarty suggests that figure be taken in context. "Three years ago, that number would have been 75 percent," he claims.

A recent report from the consultancy Bain & Co. revealed that companies that put more effort into CRM up front (including long-term planning, unwavering executive sponsorship, and diligent change management) get more out of the technology. Those companies that put a "major effort" into CRM reported a 4.17 satisfaction score on a five-point scale, while those putting in a "limited effort" were only able to achieve a 3.53 score.

More companies now consider CRM critical to their enterprise application portfolio, according to Datamonitor: "As the increasing number of organizations understand the importance of positive customer experiences and strong customer relationships, the market for [CRM] applications continues to expand."

The report found the CRM sector increasingly segmented by enterprise size. Whereas CRM was once primarily for large companies, Datamonitor estimates that companies with fewer than 1,000 employees made up one-third of all CRM licenses sold last year; by 2012, that sector will hold 42 percent of the market.

But Datamonitor's analysis found that many end users are cautious when considering CRM for fear of facing adoption issues. These companies reported several "adoption inhibitors," including software complexity; high total cost of ownership; and lack of strategic support for CRM installations.

On-demand software has become a credible alternative, but report author Vuk Trifkovic, a technology analyst at Datamonitor, doesn't expect it will significantly alter the CRM market in coming years. (The report estimates the present-day global on-demand CRM market to be approximately $1 billion.) Trifkovic expects to see a substantially more competitive on-demand market, with established on-demand vendors facing pressure from smaller ones -- and both competing against traditional on-premise vendors that now offer on-demand editions.

The on-demand application model -- in which the vendor hosts the CRM software on distant servers -- removes the end user's headache of daily maintenance and technical operations. Such applications will drive CRM adoption, particularly at small and midsize enterprises that have held back due to concerns about implementation issues, the report says.

"Although [the on-demand] method does address certain adoption inhibitors, CRM on-demand, alone, cannot transform the market," Trifkovic writes.

Top 25 CRM News Stories of 2007

As 2008 arrives, a look back at the most popular online stories of last year.

by Editors of CRM magazine

Heading into 2008, awash in predictions and guesses about what the year ahead is likely to bring, we thought it was a fine time to step back and take a moment to reflect on the 25 stories viewed most often by visitors here at destinationCRM.com.

It's important to note, of course, that stories posted recently haven't had the benefit of extra time to trickle through the series of tubes we call the Internet, so it's no surprise that any list such as this would skew heavily toward the first quarter of the year -- it's impossible to guess what this list will look like a few months or even a year from now. (If you've got an algorithm for accurately weighting popularity as a factor of time, we'd love to hear about it.) If history is any guide, articles eventually develop lives of their own, spiking in popularity weeks or even months after they're first written -- as companies change, products are introduced or updated, and related trends emerge.

Consider some of the major headlines from the year that aren't yet on this list:

• the business-intelligence fire sale that included Oracle acquiring Hyperion Solutions, SAP making a bid for Business Objects, and IBM snapping up Cognos;
• the late-year launches of SAP Business ByDesign, SAP CRM 2007, and Microsoft's Dynamics CRM 4.0;
• the initial public offerings for NetSuite and (after a short delay) SoundBite Communications;
• the ongoing legal battle between SAP and Oracle over alleged corporate espionage by an SAP subsidiary;
• a major restructuring and some wholesale corporate tumult at Sage Software;
• departures of key CRM executives from SAP (Shai Agassi) and Oracle (John Wookey);
• Oracle's offer to buy middleware competitor BEA Systems -- which was quickly rejected;
• CEO departures from Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories (for Nuance Communciations) and from Callidus Software (for Microsoft);
• the launch of Apple's iPhone and the mainstreaming of enterprise mobility in CRM overall;
• Salesforce.com hitting a milestone (its millionth subscriber) and launching its Platform-as-a-Service; and
• upgrades -- and new naming conventions -- for the core CRM suites of NetSuite, Concursive Corp. (formerly Centric CRM) and RightNow Technologies.

All these stories were major events in 2007, stories likely to have repercussions in the year ahead -- and none of them has yet cracked the Top 25.

That said, the articles that do currently comprise the Top 25 have been popular for a reason, and they reflect a wide range of subject matter -- from research reports to trend analysis, from vendor announcements to product launches. What's really amazing is the sheer breadth of the CRM industry reflected in this list -- 18 of the 25 headlines mention a CRM vendor by name, with only two vendors appearing more than once. We take that as a sign of how democratic the marketplace truly has become (and perhaps a sign that we're doing a fairly decent job being representative of that marketplace).

But enough dragging out the suspense -- here are the Top 25, as of Dec. 31, 2007:

#1 - SAS Tops Gartner's BI Magic Quadrant (2/1/2007)
#2 - Verint: Can I Get a Witness? (2/12/2007)
#3 - Gartner Combines Two Magic Quadrants (2/14/2007)
#4 - Midmarket CRM Grows (2/23/2007)
#5 - Beagle Honors the Wizzes in the Biz (3/6/2007)
#6 - High-Tech Wages Are On the Upswing (1/3/2007)
#7 - Infor Is the Top Performer in Performance Management (1/22/2007)
#8 - SPSS Refreshes Its Data Mining Software (1/16/2007)
#9 - Microsoft Brings Analytics to the Desktop (2/14/2007)
#10 - A Dot KANA Solution (1/22/2007)
#11 - Omniture and Salesforce.com Take a Meeting (9/11/2007)
#12 - What's in a Lead? (1/9/2007)
#13 - Centric CRM Updates Its Offerings (3/9/2007)
#14 - An SFA Wave Hits a Crowded Beach (5/3/2007)
#15 - NetSuite Moves Up the E-Commerce Ladder (2/15/2007)
#16 - SugarCRM Adds Spice (1/29/2007)
#17 - A New Flavor of Microsoft Dynamics CRM (1/10/2007)
#18 - Business Objects Makes Baby's First BI (2/5/2007)
#19 - Siebel Continues to Fly Solo as a Leader (3/7/2007)
#20 - RightNow Delivers on Voice Commitment (2/5/2007)
#21 - Offline-Level Service Is a Must-Have in the Virtual World (1/8/2007)
#22 - Avaya Begins an Ascent (1/15/2007)
#23 - Yahoo! Is the New E-Biz Satisfaction Leader (8/14/2007)
#24 - Salesforce.com Makes a Vertical Splash (2/28/2007)
#25 - Oracle's World of Unlimited Possibilities (1/31/2007)